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Andrew Stuttaford

Should atheist politicians “come out”?

When it comes to this sort of thing, I’ve always thought that the late Henry IV of France (1553-1610) was onto something when he explained (apocryphally at least) why he had converted to Roman Catholicism on ascending the French throne. “Paris,” he supposedly said, “is worth a mass”. Going through a (to him) presumably meaningless ritual was no big deal if it paved the way to power.

What mattered was what he did with that power. And what he did was to be a good king, with achievements that included crushing the fanatics of the Catholic League, and promulgating the Edict of Nantes, which granted a good degree of religious tolerance to France’s Protestant minority.

And so it should be here. If it takes a little hypocrisy for a good sound godless politician to get elected, so be it. Bring on the prayer breakfasts!

But one real cost to this silence it is the role that it has played in the rise of the assumption that those on the Right (except Randians and some of those wacky libertarians) are by definition religious, something that is by no means the case, as visitors to this site must surely know.

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